Success: The Unofficial Tomato Soup SEO Challenge

For those of you who think it’s difficult to rank at the top of Google for a particular search term, I present to you Exhibit A: “How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur.” Go ahead, Google it. As of the time I’m writing this, the number one spot is owned by yours truly – SearchEngingViking.com.

Tomato Soup: It tastes like SEO victory.

It just goes to show that dominating the Search Engines isn’t impossible or even difficult. I’ll explain all it took in this very post, which hopefully you’ll take to heart. Why? Because you can apply the same techniques for your own websites and keywords and, over time, stand tall at the top of the Google SERPs.

The Back Story

Some of you may remember a recent post I wrote called What Is SEO? In that post I used a simple example: A web page for people wondering “How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur.” What you may not have realized was that I was actually setting that phrase up to rank at the top of the Search Engines, specifically Google.

So I did a few tiny SEO tricks – nothing fancy or difficult – and in less time than it took for Charlie Sheen to relapse I was sitting on the top of Google.

Granted I purposely picked a super low competition keyword (actually, there was NO competition for the exact phrase as a whole – I’ll show you how I knew that later), but I figured there’s be a few random pages ranking above it anyway, since the search engines can be fickle. So I just assumed I’d need to work a little SEO magic to climb on top. But no, SearchEngineViking.com outranks the other 23,400 sites that Google thinks are somewhat related to the phrase “How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur.”

How Long It Took

Good question. Honestly, I don’t know. No, I didn’t pass out and lose time while partying with Motley Crue, I honestly thought it would take longer than it did (it often does) so I wasn’t in the habit of checking Google every hour. What I do know is that wrote the initial What Is SEO? post on Feb. 26, 2010 and checked the SERPs for the first time last night (March 7, 2010). That’s about a week and a half. But like I said, it could have happened at any point between the two.

Analyzing The Competition

No Tomato Soup Here.

Like I said, I knew there were exactly zero websites intentionally trying to rank for the term “How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur.” How did I know this? I used Google – no expensive software tools, no professional mobsters, no favors to Old-World Italian fathers on their daughters’ wedding days.

I searched Google in two different ways for this experiment: The way most people search and the way SEO nerds like myself search. In both cases I entered a the phrase into the Google search bar, the only difference was quotation marks. Here’s the phrases:

How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur: Resulting competition = 23,400.

What this means? Google thinks that 23,400 websites are related (in various capacities) to the search term.

Now for the second phrase:

“How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur”: Resulting competition = 2 (both of which are SearchEngineViking.com pages).

What this means? That my two pages are the only pages in the Google Index that are purposely targeting the phrase. The difference between the two types of searches is that using quotation marks analyzes your EXACT competition.

Why Should You Care?

Because I’m sure you can think of all sorts of crazy phrases that you can easily and quickly dominate. And chances are you can think of some really zany ones that actually relate to your website, and thus the products or services you may offer. The longer the phrase, the greater the odds that nobody else is going after them.

Are you going to get crazy amounts of traffic from these goofy phrases? Probably not. But on the off chance someone does search for the term, you’ll be in the prime Google position.

But more importantly, topping Google will make you feel like a Search Engine god!

Here’s How I Did It

Like I said, it didn’t take much to dominate this term. I knew it would take much, but it honestly took even less than I expected. And it all came from these amazingly simple SEO strategies that you can incorporate yourself. Here they are:

I used the phrase several times in the post. When Google scanned my page, it noticed that I repeated that phrase a couple of times, and therefore decided that it must be a major talking point, and therefore of value to anyone who searches for it. (Caution: if you overuse the phrase, Google might think you’re trying to trick it, so be warned…)

I used quotation marks and bold. This is a big point of contention amongst the SEO crowd, but I’ve always believed that Google gives special attention to web text that’s written in bold or surrounded by quotation marks.

I included the phrase in the All-In-One SEO WordPress plugin. This site is built on the WordPress platform, and I’ve installed this plugin for SEO purposes. It’s a rockin piece of code that I plan on discussing in more depth at a later time.

I linked back to the story using the phrase as anchor text. Anchor what? It just means the text that links back to the page was the exact phrase I was trying to dominate. For example, if I were to say “Click HERE to learn how to get tomato soup out of yellow dog fur,” the anchor text is “HERE” because it’s what actually links back to the page. But if you check out my previous post What Are Backlinks?, you’ll see that I included the link like this:

For instance, in my last post I used the example How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur to explain some basic SEO concepts.

See what the anchor text is? It’s the phrase. It makes a difference, trust me.

(And for those of you keeping score at home, yes, I am blatantly stocking this post full of internal backlinks. Good catch. Nothing gets past you!)

Disclaimers

1. I probably would not have topped Google so quickly and with so little effort for a more competitive term. So don’t get any wild ideas that you can throw up a page with the term “Porn” on it and outrank everybody else (the porn industry employs SEO specialists by the thousands, so that’s a pretty tough challenge).

2. All information about the Search Engines – including my position on them – was accurate as of the time I am writing this. These figures are bound to change over time.

3. I’m not going to spend any more time on the phrase “How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur,” so if one of you wiseguys gets a wild hair and decides to dethrone me from the top spot: be my guest. I’m mentioning this as a possibility only to explain the possibility that I’m not at the top spot in real time when you read this.

4. I’ve used the phrase “How To Get Tomato Soup Out Of Yellow Dog Fur” so frequently in this post that I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it also starts showing up in the Google SERPs, too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 3:14 am by Lee and is filed under Goals & Status. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.